Profile
Early Life and Professional Career
Veda Guardman, was born Veda Grant in the city of Urbis, an hour away from Greengale. She lived the majority of her life in Urbis including attending the University of Urbis, where she met Samuel Guardman, who she eventually dated and married.
Veda was a smart and precocious child, extremely independent and always wanting to help people. She obtained a bachelor’s—and then masters—in social work and went on to have a career in child and family welfare. Though she worked in the department of social services for several years, after obtaining her masters, she went on to create her own program designed around helping people suffering from drug dependency. After building up the program, she left it in the hands of the people she’d trained and started another organization to aid underserved families, giving them the tools they needed to rise out of poverty. After that, she built up a program for at-risk youth.
After a twenty year career, Veda Guardman had built up a network of programs and services in the Urbis area and she spent her time mostly training others to run them. She’d started most of the programs from her home in Greengale but built each of them up so that they could run independently out of offices in Urbis with their own dedicated staff. As such, she is semi-retired, earning money as a consultant, trainer, and speaker.
Becoming Part of the Legacy
Veda married Samuel Guardman shortly after getting her bachelor’s degree, and the couple moved to a house in Greengale that he already owned. It was shortly after their marriage that she learned the truth about Samuel’s legacy and the secret that he and his friends kept. Though it was hard to believe at first, she became intimately involved since she knew that whatever child they had would become linked to the secret as well.
Samuel also revealed that the group made a pack to all have children within a few years of each other so that they could grow up friends, just as what had been done before. She learned that even though they’d lost a lot of the knowledge from their home world, some abilities remained, specifically around procreation. Through mentus, women could control when they got pregnant, and the men could control the gender of the baby. This was why Sam’s family always had boys as the first born, to keep the ‘Guardman’ name alive, something their ancestor wanted since he was a mandant on Mendala and hoped that one day one of his descendants would be a guardian.
Though Veda was worried about the legacy she’d be passing down to her son, she also embraced the secret world that Samuel was a part of, befriending many of the other spouses who were in her same position, especially Maggie Summerson and Annabelle Young. Where Kenneth Wright was the de facto leader of the seal bearers, Veda Guardman was much the same for the spouses who were in on the secret, and everyone trusted her insight into how best to deal with the next generation of seal bearers. She also helped mediate the myriad of arguments that came up between the seal bearers and was seen as their natural arbitrator when problems arose.
She helped facilitate the bonds of the children growing up, babysitting a good number of the kids at her house after school when they were young. As the A&A Club became more prominent, she was the one responsible for monitoring the group. She functioned as a sort of unofficial advisor to the teens, since they always met at her house She also chaperoned their trips when they were younger.
After the death of Samuel, Ken, and several other seal bearers, Veda’s leadership role among the remaining seal bearers and their spouses became even more prominent, but this also had to do with the prophetic dreams she’d started to have, though in reality, they were not dreams.
Though not one of the seal bearers, it seemed that Veda Guardman would have her own role to play in their legacy. For reasons no one could explain, she is one of the few people with access to the Waiting Room, a pocket dimension between the mortal and heavenly realms. From there, she can converse with the gatekeeper, Zeta, a heavenly being responsible for watching over the realm.
Zeta is able to bring her to the Waiting Room because she is considered a caretaker of the realm, though it’s not clear what that means or how she was picked. She’s had several interactions with the ethereal being, the first being shortly before Aiden Young’s suicide, which she told no one about. The next was several years later before the accident that would claim the lives of her husband and several more people involved with the seal. This was the first time she shared her visions with the others. Each time she was given specific warnings to help her and the other seal bearers prepare for what was to come. It wasn’t until after the accident though that the others started to really take her prophetic encounters seriously.
It is because of these visions that she knows her son and his friends will discover the legacy of the seal bearers before their parents are ready to tell them, and that they will end up being the last seal bearers. However, it’s not until she’s whisked away to Mendala with them that she truly understands the ramifications of this. Though not a seal bearer herself, she ultimately becomes more involved with the legacy of Mendala than any of the other parents.
More than Meets the Eye
Though seemingly a very normal woman, there has always been something undefinably different about Veda Guardman. Her truly empathetic soul and ability to engender trust and respect from others aren’t exactly unique traits, but they appear to be magnified. She doesn’t seem to see it herself, but those who spend a lot of time around her will attest to it.
This, coupled with her ability to enter the Waiting Room, marks Veda Guardman as someone who is far more than what she appears.
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